Both MamaMia & Melinda Tankard-Reist have run stories on footballers behaving badly, after the New Zealand Warriors rugby team drafted Shaun Metcalf, who spent 18 months in jail for rallying a couple of his teammates to help him kick his pregnant teen girlfriend to cause her to miscarriage. Tankard-Reist writes:

‘We can all get caught up in the emotional image of young men booting a young woman in the stomach to cause her to abort her baby, but these were two young people … she got pregnant, he was way out of his depth, and he did a really cruel and dumb thing.

‘He was caught in the moment, and what he did was the equivalent of a young man putting a noose around his neck because his girlfriend tossed him out. He has to be allowed to move forward and put his life together, and I think the ability of the NRL and the Warriors to take this young man in and help him do that is role modelling and something they should get credit for’…

“Oh no, we wouldn’t want to get caught up in an image of young footballers playing football with the pregnant womb of a 15-year old girl now would we?

“‘The equivalent of putting the noose around his neck’? No, it was the equivalent of putting a noose around her neck—and the neck of her child. Laslie paints the act as some kind of self-punishment. But he wasn’t assaulted. He wasn’t trying to protect the child he was carrying. It wasn’t he who might lose his life.”

This makes me even more upset that my body corporate won’t allow Foxtel installation: MamaMia has their own TV show on SkyNews, Tuesday nights at 8pm. Congrats to the MamaMia team; they really are showing that the blogosphere is the new media frontier.

“… Many young women conclude that happiness is something that you only get when you get to your goal weight. And even more troublingly, when it comes to relationships, lots of straight girls think that if their own bodies aren’t perfect, they have no right to expect too much from guys.”

“… My world is a better place when I can fucking breathe. My world is a better place when someone is not trying to convince me that making myself into a human sausage will make the world a better place.”